Naming Names

• With Northbound Brand

  • Northbound Brand’s practice includes industrial-strength naming for large clients who need not just names, but naming strategies across products, features, and lines of business. Think Microsoft, Amazon, United Healthcare, and more. I’ve participated dozens of times in Northbound’s highly productive naming process.

• With Others

  • I helped creative agency Jennergy rename the largest terminal in the Port of Los Angeles.

  • I helped cirque-with-dinner producer Teatro ZinZanni name a new restaurant which, sadly, did not survive the pandemic. The exact name was less important than the process, which achieved the goals of diverse stakeholders—a restaurant group, a property owner and yes, a working circus—with an effective name on a very tight schedule.

• Individually

  Once in a while a solo naming project presents itself. Here are three examples.

  • Pacific Volt makes voltage regulators which calm the destructive variability of voltage on the electrical grid. Pacific means calm, and it also means big (useful for a startup), and it references location--they are near Seattle, and have customers around the Pacific.

  • ZettaZing was a technology start-up which built a platform for real-time large-scale communications in which I was a founder. The brand’s essential value proposition was "fast and vast." Zing gives the fast, and Zetta is a numerical prefix meaning multiply by one sextillion--a vast number. So ZettaZing = VastFast, and it zips off the tongue. In the time-honored tradition of start-ups, we failed to thrive. Still, it’s a good name.

  • Einstrong was another startup in which I was involved, which also did not survive, but had a good name. Einstrong suggests smart, powerful, and scientific, which were core components of the company’s brand. Inspirations were headstrong, angstrom (a unit of measurement useful at atomic scale) and, of course, Albert Einstein.